Bill payment by telephone has been available primarily from financial institutions for approximately 15 years. Heralded as "home banking" this technology allowed a customer of a bank, savings and loan, or credit union to pay any pre-registered bill with the use of a touch tone telephone and that financial institutions interactive voice response unit (provided that they offered the service). The customer would first have to select a financial institution that offered the service, request to participate in the service, send in a voided check, and then provide a manual list of all the bills that were desired to be paid using this system. In addition, a signature authorization card would have to signed and archived by the financial institution. The financial institution would then manually input all of this information into their computer, and then advise the customer that system access was then available. This process usually took up to two weeks to complete.
Once activated, the customer would then have the capability to call the financial institution and input payment instructions in conjunction with a touch tone telephone and reference each payee by a number that was assigned by the financial institution. This process of bill payment would allow the customer to pay bills by having the bank then issue an "electronic check" to the designated payee. This "electronic" document would then be presented to the Automated Clearing House of the U.S. Banking System for processing and clearing. In reality the process was identical to the processing of a paper check, with the only exception being that there was not any paper involved in the transaction. The payment could still "bounce" and be returned for non-sufficient funds since there was no actual verification on the customer's account balance to insure that sufficient funds were on deposit to cover the transaction. In addition, all in place check clearing time requirements were still in place, as it took typically at least 3-5 days to clear. Until clearing was realized the recipient of the funds never had actual use of the funds used for payment. If a new debt was incurred, it would have to be pre-registered on the system in order to utilize this "electronic" capability. If a customer changed financial institutions, the whole process of pre-registering all debts, signature cards, and a voided check would have to be repeated. Existing pay by phone systems offered some convenience to the user, but were cumbersome to administer and usage was never widespread.
As "home banking" gained more interest, many companies developed special purpose telephones with visual displays and "swipe card readers" that the consumer could purchase that would allow the use of a debit (ATM) card to basically achieve the same purpose as was evident in previously implemented systems (for the purposes of brevity in this disclosure the term "debit card" shall be construed to mean both debit and credit card). The only difference was that the consumer could now "swipe" the debit card through the reader that was part of the telephone. The Automated Clearing House of the U.S. Banking System was still used to process payments, and all pre-registration and signature cards were still required. All "electronic check" clearing time requirements were still needed, and the transaction would still be returned for non-sufficient funds. If a service offered a specialized telephone and bypassed the Automated Clearing House, using debit card networks, the debit card used to process the transaction required a PIN. There was a natural resistance to the purchase of special telephones that proved to be relatively expensive, in addition to the monthly fees necessary to remain a customer of this service.
As personal computers began to proliferate, many systems became available that would allow bill payment in conjunction with a third party service and a personal computer owned by the user with that third party software loaded into it, such as the Prodigy system. Still, however, all of the aforementioned limitations still applied to these personal computer based systems.
In summary, these home banking systems shared many common drawbacks. For example, the burden of pre-registration and the listing of bills to be paid was borne by the consumer. The system required the processing of transactions in the same manner as a paper check, or an electronic check through the Automated Clearing House of the U.S. Banking System. The system presented the possibility that a transaction could be returned for non-sufficient funds reasons. In addition, a clearing time for each transaction of 3-5 days. Furthermore, in many cases, the prior art home banking systems required the use of specialized equipment by the customer (such as special purpose telephones equipped with electronic card readers or encryption devices), or the financial institution offering services to it's customer base.
Moreover, although it is known in the field of accounting to call and manually, in conjunction an operator, verify that a payor had remitted a bill, there is no capability for the recipient of the funds (payee) to electronically immediately and positively inquire as to payment status after it was electronically authorized by the a debit card network. Therefore, what is needed is a universal, real-time bill payment system method and system that uses debit (ATM) cards without the requirement of a PIN (personal identification number) in conjunction with touch tone telephones to initiate consumer bill payments electronically and provide for the elimination of paper checks, as well as the use of the Automated Clearing House.